HER WORD IS HER WEAPON, FAITH47

Nigerian writer Ben Okri once said that only those who truly love, and who are truly strong, can sustain their lives as a dream and dwell in their own enchantment. After my interview with South African graffiti artist, Faith47, it is clear that she is one of those people. At first glance, Faith’s work tells the story of the harshness and injustices of living in a country like South Africa but, in her own words, it is also about "symbolism and dreams and the ambiguities of feeling politicized about the world, while still maintaining a childlike innocence and sense of wonder". What makes her art unique, especially her graffiti, is that she seamlessly weaves together the real and the fantastical. Like Ben Okri’s novels of magical realism, Faith’s art conveys the harshness of our external reality as well as our internal reality of emotions, dreams, and imagination. “I am strongly emotive about the injustices of the world”, she says, “the way whole countries are brought to their knees to fulfil the economic greed of the powerful elite, the destruction of indigenous cultures and the hegemonic infiltration of bland consumer culture throughout the world.”

Faith’s paintings are like magical, mythological landscapes at ease with liminality and contradiction – an otherworldliness where things are unstable and fluid: hats transform into peacocks and symbols come to life. They are landscapes inhabited by girl-women and watched over by demonwardarkloveangels. If Faith’s work is mythological, or what Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier refers to as “lo real maravilloso”, then she is the ultimate trickster evading categories that limit, define and construct, dancing around the trappings of language and blurring the boundaries between word and image.

Working on the gritty streets of South Africa, Faith admits that there have been times when the darkness or cruelty of “the politics of humanity” has overwhelmed her, threatened her innocence and her creative inspiration. “Sometimes I need to remind myself about the fact that there are large empty spaces within atoms and that the universe expands into infinity. That there are moments between the moments and that nothing is definable nor should it be”, she says reflectively, “that there is truth within mystery and good things and bad things are often words - just words – that life is a journey and that each decision should be made with the heart because when you die there is something that lives on still.”

It is through Faith’s mythological landscapes that many of us visit the very real world of the ghetto - a dystopian world so often removed from the reality of privileged South Africa that it might as well be fantasy. “When people drive down the highway they just see shacks, they don’t look twice. I like utilising that environment and highlighting areas. I use figures that make you think about something as you drive past or even just the word ‘Faith’.” Living in Cape Town, a city that is still strongly divided along racial and economic lines, it is unusual to cross those lines of history, those lines of attitude, in post-apartheid South Africa. For Faith, painting in the townships – the third world margins of the first world city - is all part of raising that question. But she is also irritated when people make a big deal of her going there: “It really reinforces the division of people. It’s not like that,” she says adamantly. “I’ll go with a friend that lives there and chill with them too. There’s lot of people into graffiti. It’s not like you come and impose yourself. I’ll go with friend to the townships to write and they’ll come to paint with me to my neighbourhood where I live.”

What Faith loves most about graffiti is that it is an experiential form of art that teaches her about the city she lives in. “You go into an area that you would never go into and you’re interact with people you wouldn’t usually interact with for so long. You learn about your city on a real on-the-ground level. You see how your city breathes, the way it moves over the day”, says Faith.

This is an extract of an article orginally published in Juxtapoz. Read the full article on mouth-of-word